Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I know that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.

Removing or preventing corrupting dependence would enable men to be equal in practice. At age 16 Jefferson entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg and first met the law professor George Wythe who became his influential mentor. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions which if not covered will end in their destruction which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens.

Thomas Jefferson (April 13 1743 (April 2 1743 O. Elected Vice President in 1796 when he came in second to John Adams of the Federalists Jefferson opposed Adams and with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts. In 1803 President Jefferson initiated a process of Indian tribal removal and relocation to the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River in order to open lands for eventual American settlers.